From an email, ClimateTruth.org Action[Progressive Dems and independents need to hear about this – and sign the petition! We sure hope Senators Harris and Feinstein, and Rep. Mike Thompson will join us in saying no to oil and gas campaign contributions.]

The DNC just reversed course on banning donations from fossil fuel companies, turning its back on those living with the impacts of climate change and fossil fuel extraction every day — as well as the more than 950 candidates nationwide that our community recruited to sign the No Fossil Fuel Money Pledge.

DNC executives are keeping quiet about the Friday night vote — they know taking polluter money isn’t a good look for the Party — but resistance from DNC membership is growing and the press is beginning to take notice.

By ringing the alarm now, we can hold the DNC accountable to its values, and force a new vote during the DNC’s Summer Meeting in Chicago in two weeks.

The DNC’s Executive Committee voted on a resolution sponsored by Chairman Tom Perez. The resolution is framed in terms of supporting workers, but welcomes “the longstanding and generous contributions of… [energy industry] political action committees” and declares support for an “all of the above” energy policy.

Supporting workers as we transition to clean energy is absolutely essential — but taking money from fossil fuel industry PACs is the wrong way to do it. The ban on fossil fuel company money adopted by the DNC just two months ago didn’t limit unions and employees from donating to the Party — so the only effect of Friday’s resolution was to re-open DNC coffers to fossil fuel company PACs.

Elizabeth Warren and others are already standing up to oppose the DNC’s vote — a testament to the months of work by thousands in our community to push this issue to the top of the national conversation.

Together, we’ve built the No Fossil Fuel Money Pledge from a good idea into a juggernaut that’s changing the 2018 elections for the better. Let’s be sure the DNC leads, follows, or gets out of our way.

How to mobilize reluctant voters

By Melissa Michelson, July 15, 2014

(AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)

Americans of different ethnicities vote at very different rates. Whites and blacks tend to vote more frequently than Latinos and Asians. Older people and wealthier people vote more frequently than the young and the poor. Increasing turnout among groups that tend to vote at lower rates can not only increase their political power, but also change the outcomes of elections. Indeed, this is a major reason that Democrats are concentrating so much on mobilizing voters who don’t vote in midterm elections.

Could this strategy work? Is it possible to mobilize people who are otherwise uninterested in voting or reluctant to vote? We now have good answers to these questions. People who have not participated much before can indeed be moved to go to the polls.

What really mobilizes these voters is repeated personal contacting. In our book Mobilizing Inclusion, Lisa García Bedolla and I describe 268 get-out-the-vote field experiments conducted repeatedly across six electoral cycles from 2006 to 2008. These field experiments were focused on communities with a history of low participation and were conducted in partnership with non-partisan community-based organizations. Because these experiments randomly assign some voters to be contacted in particular ways and others not to be contacted, we can better know what actually gets people to the ballot box.

Our analysis shows that citizens who haven’t voted much in the past can be inspired by either door-to-door visits or live phone calls. Tellingly, our research shows that such contacts, especially if repeated, can produce habitual voters. Phone banks from which callers contact the same potential voters twice are especially effective in creating committed voters. Door-to-door campaigns also showed strong results, with one such effort increasing voter turnout by more than 40 percentage points. (To be sure, most get-out-the-vote campaigns produce smaller gains.)

Personal contacting works to persuade people to vote regularly even though the interactions do not increase voters’ resources and have little or no impact on their underlying attitudes about public issues. It is the social interaction itself that seems to matter. These interactions appear to change reluctant citizens’ entrenched understandings of themselves as disengaged from the polity. For most Americans – and especially for low-income citizens of color – it is very rare to be contacted for the sole purpose of being urged to vote. When such an unexpected interaction occurs, it can be very meaningful.

Personal contact to encourage voting can be enough to cause many low-income minority people to see themselves anew, as the sorts of people who regularly go to the polls on Election Day. In turn, voting even once can become habit forming, reinforcing self-identification as “a voter” long after the initial conversation with a canvasser. What is more, voter contacts have strong spillover effects within households, boosting participation by others as much as 60 percent.

These field experiments also shed light on tactics that do not work. Perhaps most interestingly, messages designed to appeal to ethnic or racial solidarities aren’t more effective than general appeals to “civic duty” or other broad concerns.

For example, among African-American voters experiments conducted in cooperation with community organizations using “Green Jobs” or other non-racial issue-based appeals have successfully increased turnout, while another experiment that stressed racial solidarity did not. Among Asian-Americans, appeals that stress ethnic community empowerment have proven no more effective than general messages telling people how to go about voting. Among Latinos, dozens of randomized experiments have effectively mobilized Latino voters with a variety of appeals, although recent work I have done with Ali Valenzuela in California and Texas suggests that appeals to ethnic solidarity can be more effective for Latinos who are less incorporated into the broader American culture and who have stronger ties to their Latino identity.

As candidates, political parties, and interest groups gear up for the 2014 and 2016 elections, recent scholarship shows how to bring reluctant voters to the polls. Largely regardless of the message, personal contact with reluctant voters — even once, but especially repeatedly — can shape the electorate dramatically.

What would it take?

Can we save our country?

The midterms are in four months.

With so much in the balance, it would be hard to overstate the importance of this election.

We have some things going for us.

We are closer than ever to our goal of flipping the House. We beat the odds and got a Democrat on the ballot in every California congressional race despite the hazardous top two primary. Volunteers have been working in CA-10 for over a year and are well prepared to spring into action to help candidate Josh Harder unseat incumbent Republican Jeff Denham. And every day more people are waking up to the extremism of the Trump administration and want to get involved.

3. Grow the movement! Taking action with others is not only an excellent antidote to despair, but it can also be a lot of fun! So as you connect with friends, neighbors, and loved ones over the July 4th holiday, please ask them to join you in this fight of a lifetime to save our democracy. Attending this SWING LEFT TRAINING EVENT (July 21st in Pleasant Hill) might be a way to get started.